video

Rammstein’s Deutschland looks very French to me

Published on April 12, 2019Leave a comment

I can’t help but look at the video for Deutschland and see Enki Bilal in it.

Enki Bilal and Pierre Christin/Jean-Claude Mézières’ Valerian series, or rather one particular album in that series, Sur les Terres Truquées. The latter because it’s a story set in a series of (faked) important historical moments that ultimately collide together into one big mess at the climax of the story. Not unlike the video with its mosaic of dark scenes from Germany’s shameful past, from Romans slaughtered in the woods of Germania to Rammstein themselves as Jewish prisoners being executed. In the end these too all blend together.

But I was mostly reminded of Enki Bilal. That mix of perverted science, mythology and religion, the fascination with fascism and totalitarianism, the sense of decay and degeneration, it’s all very Bilalesque. Ruby Commey too, as Germania could’ve walked out from one of his stories, beautiful and the focal point of each scene she appears in, but corrupted. There’s a layer of grime in most of Bilal’s settings that you see in the video too, the scene of the monks devouring offal frex. Whether or not the makers were actually inspired by him or not doesn’t really matter, but it sure looks like something Bilal could’ve made.

Friday Funk: Curtis Mayfield

Published on March 22, 2019Leave a comment

Back in 2004 I worked for a small startup company that made — hang on to your hats — software with which you could use your mobile phone to connect your laptop to the internet. This was back in the days when dinosaurs still roamed the land, the iPhone wasn’t even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eyes and there were like a billion different phone makers who each brought out a zillion different phones, all which needed to be tested to see if our software could recognise and use them correctly. Manually. To be honest the job paid lousy but it was a recession and the long hours were sort of made up for by things like free lunch (yes yes) and free drinks. But especially by the pooled music library that lived on the network to which everybody had uploaded their favourite music to work through the night with.

It so happened that one of the dudes working there was a huge funk and soul fan and thanks to that I got to sample a lot of groups and artists I’d barely heard off until then. One of which was Curtis Mayfield, who upon then, only knew from Move on Up as one of those songs you hear on golden oldies radio. Hearing him in context was a revelation. Being a metal head by nature I’d never done much exploring of the funk & soul genres, but what with Sandra being a Northern Soul veteran and getting my hands on that co-worker’s stack of classic funk ‘n soul that changed rapidly and Curtis Mayfield was on the forefront of it.

You can understand why looking at this 1972 Beat Club mini concert, can’t you? Socially conscious music you can dance to performed by a band at the height of its powers.

Current weeb musical obsession

Published on March 21, 2019Leave a comment

A vocaloid video that almost exclusively consists of Japanese onomatopoeia and stock phrases, with a seriously funky beat underneath it.

Anime that means something — Introduction

Published on March 16, 2019Leave a comment

The first anime series I can remember watching I don’t actually remember watching, I just remember playing it in kindergarten afterwards, in what must’ve been 1980. The series was the original Gatchaman, or rather the Dutch dub of the American reworking Battle of the Planets, Strijd der Planeten, with the heroic adventures of the Giefors team. I think I mostly played either the princess or that one fat dude, setting up some expectations for later life.

That’s obviously long before I ever heard of anime, or even Japanimation as it would still be called once I did learn about it, sometime in the later half of the eighties. Before that it was all just cartoons, mostly dubbed into Dutch and often edited for a children’s audience, not that different from all the French or English or Canadian co-productions that we would watch back then. That was in a time when we only had two national channels in the Netherlands, no cable and if you’re lucky and lived close enough to the border, perhaps you’d get a Belgian or German channel too. I remember one glorious Spring afternoon when conditions were clear enough to receive BBC one for five minutes. It was cricket.

For the better part of two decades now I’ve been following Andrew Weiss, first for his comics blogging, then for the mix of insightful commentary on pop culture and autobiographical examination of same. One of the things I envy in his blogging is his dedication to long series of posts on a single subject and ability to see them through even if they take years to complete. One of those series was about albums that mean something, looking at the circumstances in which some of his favourites albums were purchased. When I started thinking about doing a series about the anime that influenced me it was this that came to mind as a template. I’m not sure yet how regular this feature will appear or how many installments it will take, but I’ll try and do it in a rough sort of chronological order.

Graham, Graham, Graham Glinner — there really is no one dimmer

Published on January 21, 2019Leave a comment

Graham Linehan has been mentioned here before, but now we’ve got a new person more mature than our Glinner and his very normal obsession with trans women. Twitch streamer Hbomberguy got pissed off so much at Glinner’s attempt to defund the trans youth charity Mermaids he decided to start a stream to raise money for it:

So far he’s managed to raise over £250,000 for Mermaids and made tens of thousands of people aware of how much of a transphobic knob Glinner is. Who said gamers were all trash?